Season are changing. Can you feel it?
Time feels…wack! But yet, the moments keep stacking up. Olga Tokarczuk offers one way we might look at the passing of time in her novel, Flights.
Once we’re on the bus, she sets out her theory of time. She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death.
But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages.
Every moment is unique, no moment can ever be repeated.
This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights via Austin Kleon
How are you feeling time? Linear or circular?
This is your weekly, Sunday Roundup. Please submit (via this form) a picture of your favorite ODE from week 10 (wohoo!), October 5 - 11 along with the title of the other ODEs you wrote. You have until Tuesday at 5 pm EST to submit your ODEs for the previous week. Wednesday you will receive the Midweek Pause with everyone’s ODEs.
If you missed a week of submissions, you are welcome to go back and submit for previous weeks at any time.
Be well,
Katie